Emacs Org-mode: More on Todos and Clock Reports

Previously, on The Wandering Coder, we used org-mode to build a more automatable answer to the questions “what did I work on last Friday?” and “what sorts of tasks did I work on last week?”. At the end of that entry, we had a simple file that let us clock time against tasks, set the TODO status of those tasks, and produce clock table reports of the result.

Here are three additional points that were not on that critical path but are still nice-to-haves:

Customizing TODO Keywords

TODO and DONE are the default TODO keywords, but you can over-ride that by creating a line #+TODO at the top of the file with your own list of custom todo keywords, for instance:

#+TODO: TODO STARTED BLOCKED QA DONE

And then, after pressing C-c C-c to reload and use the new values, C-c C-t will run through not the default of TODO and DONE but the new list of custom keywords.

More org-clock-table customizations

Exploring the clock table documentation reveals many more options to add to the #+BEGIN: line to customize the results than just :block today to see what was done today, or :block today-1 to see yesterday, or :tags “unplanned” to see the tasks tagged as :unplanned:.

If for instance we want the report for last week but broken down day-by-day, for instance, we could add to the #+BEGIN: line (remember also to press C-c C-c to update the results):

If your work sprint runs from Wednesday to Wednesday instead of Monday to Friday, as mine did last year, you can add :wstart 3 (instead of 1, which is Monday and the default), and then the weekly report from